To my surprise, the nineties alumna who vaulted past her classmates was a late entrant into the race, but in the eight years since Burch opened her first boutique on Elizabeth Street, she alone has distanced herself indisputably from claims of dilettantism and has outlasted the skepticism that pegged her company as a rich lady’s hobby or, at best, a flash in the pan. Tory Burch will do $800 million in sales this year at 83 boutiques worldwide, some of which the founder hasn’t yet had time to visit. Burch’s business model seems to be the millennial summing-up of multiple Seventh Avenue legends from previous decades: the colorful preppy fun of Lilly Pulitzer, the throw-it-on ease of Diane von Furstenberg, the intuitive grasp of fashion-as-sexual-politics of Donna Karan, and the faultless lifestyle marketing of Ralph Lauren—all hybridized with the price-point savvy of J. Crew.
When Burch launched her label, my first thought was, Why would she bother? She appeared to have it all: Waspy good looks, picture-perfect children, a rich husband, and a sprawling Pierre hotel apartment that was famous for being the best of her generation’s, a rarefied distinction that ranked her with older salonistes, from Mrs. Astor to Nan Kempner to Susan Gutfreund. In the years since, I’ve often felt hard-pressed to define what makes her tick. In conversation, where you would expect to feel the heat of her ambition, you instead get pleasant reserve—steady nerves in the face of a vertigo-inducing rise have been Burch’s hallmark. Her composure has remained unruffled by her divorce from Christopher Burch, and by her subsequent relationships with high-profile boyfriends—first Lance Armstrong, and currently Warner Music chieftain Lyor Cohen. The family center has held. “My boys are doing great,” she says of her three sons. “That’s all that matters to me.”
Our conversation yields one tiny clue, however. When I ask what she wanted to be when she grew up, Burch replies: “I think it was probably around social work or being a psychiatrist.” When I ask what her parents wanted her to be, she pauses, caught for once without an answer polished smooth by eight years of constant media exposure. “I would say, um, early on, a tennis player,” Burch speculates, allowing a glimpse into a childhood in which you played by the rules, but you played to win. That Burch still comports herself with the mannerly intensity of a country club tennis champion speaks to the precise quality of her early home training.
“I love to work,” Burch said during her 2005 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show that anointed her “the next big thing” and generated 8 million hits on her company’s website. “I live a life where I take chances, and if I believe in something, I go for it.”
